It sent a constant signal over a mile radius, so he activated it in two-second bursts, hoping to conserve his battery and avoid giving his position away to the Serbs. Too late. The military were camped barely a mile away when they received new orders. Stop looking for the American. Leave him to the paramilitaries; they could get blamed for his death. By evening, he was delirious with thirst. He removed his socks and squeezed the water out of them, which was when he realized he had trench foot.
June 7 again found him firing his beacon in brief bursts, hoping NATO would find him before the Serbs. Captain Thomas O. Hanford was with the th Squadron completing his late night patrol on June 8. At AM, he picked up something over his radio static. By then, he had been flying for over three hours and only had 20 minutes of fuel left. He flew low, risking Serbian fire and a reprimand from his superiors.
They needed to rescue him with helicopters, but fighter escort planes would not be available until the next day. Should they rescue him in darkness?
Or wait until morning when they would have support? NATO decided to risk it. The choppers were easy pickings. They fired back at the Serbs, but they were well-hidden in the trees below.
One bullet hit a Marine, but his canteen stopped it. Another struck the tail blades — they lost pressure. Still another took out their communications. Story highlights Air Force Capt. Scott O'Grady's F was hit by a Serb missile while flying a peacekeeping mission over Bosnia After six days evading paramilitary forces firing at anything that moved, he was rescued by U. Marines Twenty years later, he is a partner at a Dallas-based commercial real estate company.
In the summer of , the Air Force captain was flying over Bosnia, enforcing the no-fly zone when a surface-to-air missile slammed into his F He parachuted into enemy territory and for almost a week he evaded the trigger-happy Serbian paramilitary forces that wanted to kill him. Even after he was rescued on a mountaintop by U.
Marines, O'Grady wasn't safe. As he sat -- shivering, hungry, dehydrated -- aboard a helicopter flying him out of the combat zone, the chopper and another in the rescue team took ground, anti-aircraft and missile fire. A bullet bounced off a canteen belonging to a Marine sitting a few feet away from the rescued pilot. O'Grady spent just two days on the USS Kearsarge getting medical care before he was hustled back to the United States for a feel-good tour for a nation that needed an emotional boost after the terrible bombing two months earlier of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed people.
Read More. O'Grady was everywhere. His face was on magazines. Everyone knew of his courage and will to survive. They all wanted to hear how he evaded capture, how he survived trekking through the woods and up mountains. They wanted to know how he found his strength. He told them how his faith in God, country and his desire to see his family got him through, but he also wanted to impart how the experience changed his view about material things and his wants.
And it's OK to plan for your future, but that you need to be content and happy with where you are and what you're doing in life at this very moment. Or happiness will escape you. O'Grady acknowledges onlookers as he arrives in Italy after his June rescue. The constant attention he used to get in public, often at his motivational speeches, is gone 20 years later. He looks much the same, but it's rare that anyone recognizes him immediately.
That seems to suit him just fine. Dream job. Scott O'Grady always wanted to be a pilot. His father, who was in the Navy, took him up for the first time when he was 6 and the family lived in California.
Scott got his pilot license when he was teenager after the family had moved to Spokane, Washington. In December , O'Grady began his year of military pilot training. O'Grady said everyone in his class wanted to be a fighter pilot, but where you were assigned depended on class rank, which planes were available and the Air Force's needs.
O'Grady spent the next two years learning tactics and weapons systems, focusing on the craft of becoming a fighter pilot. While based in South Korea, some of his missions involved flying along the demilitarized zone between the North and the South.
O'Grady's next assignment was in Germany, from where he would fly combat missions in the no-fly zone over northern Iraq. Seeing combat. In the early s, Yugoslavia -- a multiethnic state of Serbs, Croats and Muslims -- dissolved into six countries and bloody conflict broke out.
Bosnia-Herzegovina was the site of some of the worst fighting -- almost , people died in the civil war, many of them in "ethnic cleansing. And that alone would deter them from their bad actions," he said. That would be a rare occasion. On February 28, , O'Grady was Capt. Robert Wright's wingman when eight Serbian jets struck a target in northwest Bosnia.
Wright engaged the Serbs as two more Fs joined the attack. Wright downed three enemy planes with his missiles, and Capt. Stephen Allen was credited with downing one plane. The fateful day. In a photo, the pilot sits in an F similar to the one he was flying over Bosnia.
Charles Malik Whitfield Rodway as Rodway. Olek Krupa Lokar as Lokar. Vladimir Mashkov Tracker as Tracker. Marko Igonda Bazda as Bazda. John Moore. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. Fighter navigator Chris Burnett wants out: he was looking for something more than the boring recon missions he's been flying. He finds himself flying the lone Christmas day mission over war-torn Bosnia.
But when he talks pilot Stackhouse into flying slightly off-course to check out an interesting target, the two get shot down. Burnett is soon alone, trying to outrun a pursuing army, while commanding officer Reigert finds his rescue operation hamstrung by politics, forcing Burnett to run far out of his way. Action Drama Thriller War. Rated PG for war violence and some language. Did you know Edit. Trivia The film is based loosely on the experiences of U.
O'Grady brought a lawsuit against Twentieth Century Fox for damages to his character. He claims he didn't curse as much and never disobeyed orders. The suit was eventually settled out of court.
Goofs During the ejection sequence, Stackhouse is not ejected after Burnett. The ejection sequence automatically ejects both pilots and he would not need to pull the handle again to eject, nor to deploy the parachute. Also he has his arms outstretched beyond the cockpit which would make them flail in the extreme wind. This is not proper ejection posture, as he should keep his hands on the handle to prevent injury.
Quotes Admiral Reigart : Let's go get our boy back!
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